04-27-2014, 03:26 AM
All this research corroborates is that stem cells have a limit on how many times they can replicate, that's not a new discovery. Any longevity treatment (and I doubt they'd be called that at the time, pretty much any age related treatment is a longevity treatment) is going to have to deal with that through cell therapy to reintroduce new stem cells. Samples taken from the patient could be reprogrammed to live longer, so long as other efforts were maintained to avoid the consequences of this (TL;DR: cancer).
Age related therapies are getting a bit of a boon at the moment, my research is funded by a grant specifically for the application to elderly patients. Many other of my tissue engineer colleagues have similar funding schemes. It is my hope that across the next several decades tissue and cell therapies can be used to drastically increase life expectancy by replacing aged and damaged tissue as needed. In addition a far better understanding of the biology behind ageing and age related disease is likely to give rise to a host of new drugs. It could be that by the end of the century it's possible to live a healthy old age for longer; one just has to take a cocktail of pills to keep certain conditions at bay and undergo check ups every so often to see if new tissues and cells need to be transplanted.
Age related therapies are getting a bit of a boon at the moment, my research is funded by a grant specifically for the application to elderly patients. Many other of my tissue engineer colleagues have similar funding schemes. It is my hope that across the next several decades tissue and cell therapies can be used to drastically increase life expectancy by replacing aged and damaged tissue as needed. In addition a far better understanding of the biology behind ageing and age related disease is likely to give rise to a host of new drugs. It could be that by the end of the century it's possible to live a healthy old age for longer; one just has to take a cocktail of pills to keep certain conditions at bay and undergo check ups every so often to see if new tissues and cells need to be transplanted.